Tag: .Net

For reasons best not gone into (or at least, not if I want my readers to stay awake), I’ve been working a lot with Microsoft’s AJAX Control Toolkit for .Net recently. If you’re unfamiliar with the ACT, it’s basically a bunch of additional web controls for .Net that do calendars, modal popups… general sorts of nice stuff.

And then suddenly on one page, I noticed a problem.

I had a hidden field, which I was using to store the value I needed when the confirmation came back yes. Let’s say (for the sake of argument) that it was either “badgers” or “cheese“.

Well, it worked the first time it ran.

And then the second time, I picked “cheese” instead of “badgers” and I got back this:

Badgers,,Cheese,,,,,,

Not. Happy.

After what felt like an aeon debugging the code, but was really only the time it takes between “Worthless Misery” and “Angel Of Agony“, I decided to debug the code.

Guess what? Turned out to be a bug in the ACT. PopupExtender controls don’t like being inside UpdatePanel controls. Who’da thunk it? What’s really amazing is that over the last 7 weeks, this is only the first time this issue has arisen.

Moral of the story, kids: keep your references up to date, and remember – it’s not always your code that’s at fault!

Those of you who’ve been reading here a while will know I used to be a huge fan of ClearType. Huge fan! I thought it made fonts really readable.

Then, about two years ago, I started to get headaches. Big, nasty headaches. So I tried fiddling with display options – upped the refresh rate (sort-of worked, for a while), changed the colour scheme… Eventually I found if I turned off ClearType, the headaches went away. Finally, I could get back to the day job.

Betas for Visual Studio 2010 and .Net framework 4 are publicly available. I’m intening to rebuild my Windows 7 beta with the release candidate, so they will go straight on there. More as I find it out 🙂

…and it’s a Microsoft product, of course. Actually, it’s the setup for Visual Studio 2008 Express. Everything works fine, other than SQL Server Express 2008 and Visual Web Developer 2008. Given that VWD was what I was really interested in, it looks like back to 2005…Read More »